Social Constructivism Paragraph

Social constructivism is a theory about how people learn - in social constructivism, people
construct their own understanding and knowledge of the world, through experiencing things and
reflecting on these experiences. I believe that social constructivism is a useful tool in the
classroom because it encourages students to use actively construct their own knowledge,
meaning that they gain information through their own experiences, and then reflect on what they
have learned and how their understanding has evolved.

In my lesson planning, I have tried to incorporate social constructivism into the components,
particularly the parts that contain ICT.

When a teacher is constructivist, they encourage the students to assess constantly how what they
are learning gives them understanding. In this lesson, I do this by encouraging students to think
about what they are learning as they go through the lesson, and encourage them to think about
their thinking in the lesson introduction and the mat session at the end (conclusion)

My lesson planning is:

- Active - children try to construct their own meaning. This is evident in Lesson 3 when
children conduct their own self-directed research to construct their own book on the beach.
Active learning is also evident in Lesson One, when children construct their own meaning of
what they gained from the book to apply to creating their own narratives

- Authentic - the learning that is done in this lesson is authentic because it relates to real life
contexts. For example, one of the topics that is discussed is sustainability at the beach,
which is a real life problem and encourages students to come up with ways to best manage
this problem. It teaches students that conservation of different environments, including the
beach, is everyone’s responsibility, thus making it a real life situation

- Cooperative - many of the activities that I have included in my lesson plan contain some
degree of cooperation among the students. For example, children need to work together in
Lessons One and Three to work together to produce different ICT projects

- Constructive - this series of lessons enables them to build upon their prior knowledge of the
beach and encourages to build on what they know from hearing Magic Beach being read to
them

- Intentional - encourages students to articulate what they are learning and assess their goals
of what they want to learn

Sources:
Information about Social Constructivism.(n.d.) Retrieved fromhttps://
socialconstructivismnda.weebly.com/